CEDAW

With Trump’s election and his conservative agenda, the work to achieve gender equality continues to move forward on many fronts and is more vital than ever. This starts with the Women’s March on Jan. 21.

The answer is things like CEDAW. Our government is an outlier for not ratifying this international women’s rights treaty, but that doesn’t need to stop us. National commissions can move the treaty’s agenda ahead. We just need more of them.

There’s been a strong push to add women’s rights to the international human rights agenda since the U.N. was founded. Ellen Chesler and Terry McGovern provide a historical perspective in this excerpt from their book “Women and Girls Rising.”

The White House announced a two-part approach to campus sexual assault, offering assistance to the victims and making public the colleges under investigation. Also this week, in Nigeria, the number of girls kidnapped continues to rise.

Dutch activists just used CEDAW to end a party’s longstanding religious objection to female candidates. That’s a lesson for women in the U.S., one of the few U.N. members that has not ratified the pact.

The first CEDAW investigation in a developed country is a “big black eye for Canada,” says one activist. The findings may not produce government action, but can stir activism, says Sally Armstrong in this excerpt from the book “Uprising.”

The scoring system measures 72 countries on such things as rates of anemia, access to agricultural land and women in policymaking positions. The United States has the lowest rates of anemia, but factors such as its failure to ratify CEDAW pushed it to 14th place.

CEDAW–the international beacon for women’s rights–does not shine on lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people in Indonesia. This is a painful disappointment, given LBT people’s need for protection from a fundamentalist backlash.

In Case You Missed It

It is being hailed as the most progressive state policy so far, going further than New Jersey, California and Rhode Island in various respects. But its showcase potential won’t be tested until the program gets going in 2018.